Last year, I structured my classes around Claudel’s The Satin Slipper. Since this year’s theme is once again “Memory and Creation,” I’d like to highlight the same quote:
“I loathe the past! I loathe memory! That voice I thought I heard just now deep within me, behind me—it is not behind me; it is calling me forward. If it were behind me, it would not possess such bitterness and such sweetness!”
Thus, the creator’s memory must not lull him into the illusory stillness of the past but propel him toward the future—perhaps with the bitterness of discomfort, but even more so, with the allure of the unknown. (“How can one live without the unknown lying ahead?” René Char).
The composer, even if a strong individual, emerges from a certain network of influences—some fortuitous, others deliberate; even the most self-taught composer, however imbued with a sense of independence, cannot escape this. The disputes over schools and independents are by no means a recent phenomenon. The very notion of a school implies accepted apprenticeship, the continuity of knowledge transmission, and submission to the discipline or doctrine of a specific group. People speak of the school’s leader with a certain admiration that is inevitably mixed with suspicion—the suspicion that he seeks to subjugate weaker personalities under his yoke—whether because they are weaker by nature or because they are still too young to defend themselves against an overbearing influence. The school leader will overload the disciple’s memory and prevent them from flourishing in their own creative expression. It is not necessarily the case, however, that they will exert this influence through direct instruction or conventional teaching methods; their impact operates through their works, their writings, and their example—without personal contact—solely through the power of imitation. The disciple’s memory—whether willingly or unwillingly—is so saturated by the master that it is incapable of the initiative necessary for true creation. As for the disciples, the “ schoolchildren,” there are no words harsh enough to condemn them for allowing themselves to be subjugated in this way; they lack originality, it is said, and the excess of direct memorization kills any nascent inclination toward individual invention they might have possessed at the outset. They have learned too well and, in the end, know only how to imitate the model, to copy the original—which proves both useless and uninteresting: ultimately, memory will have thoroughly wiped them out. On the other hand, we extol the independent spirit—the one who has successfully fought against all the temptations of school to allow oneself to be regimented. While this celebration of freedom may be healthy and invigorating, it is sometimes applied indiscriminately, and all too often puts its praise at the service of the most obvious and most painful form of dilettantism. It then seems as though learning becomes not only a danger but a flaw. Clumsiness appears as a mark of genius, and a lack of craftsmanship—in fact, a lack of culture—as the very hallmark of personality.
Does useful memory, then, depend on mastering the craft? And in what way might memory and craft be part of an assimilation process essential to creation? One might object that many composers have mastered the necessary craft, yet are no less creators for it; and that originality lacking discipline is preferable to discipline lacking originality. Admittedly, I have no objection to this argument; yet this priority cannot be regarded as an absolute criterion, and we must consider that craft and originality can—and must—go hand in hand. If we were to revive the kind of title that delighted the moralists of old, we would have to write a book entitled: On the Proper Use of Memory!
P. B.